


This is War Like You Ain't Seen

by mytimehaspassed



Category: Shameless (TV), Shameless (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M, Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-26
Updated: 2011-11-26
Packaged: 2017-10-26 14:01:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/284103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytimehaspassed/pseuds/mytimehaspassed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fiona once told him that she never dreamed of anything but not having enough money, scraping together pennies and dimes at the laminated counter of the drug store while Liam screams in pain on her hip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is War Like You Ain't Seen

**THIS IS WAR LIKE YOU AIN'T SEEN**  
SHAMELESS (US)  
Ian/Lip; Ian/Steve; (mentions of) Fiona/Steve; Ian/Mickey  
 **WARNINGS** : Supernatural!AU; incest; character deaths; underage sex.  
 **NOTES** : This is based upon [this](http://ianmickey.tumblr.com/post/12340897473/au-meme-ian-and-lip-gallagher-supernatural).

Fiona once told him that she never dreamed of anything but not having enough money, scraping together pennies and dimes at the laminated counter of the drug store while Liam screams in pain on her hip. Ian had lifted one corner of his mouth in a sad smile, and she had asked if he ever dreamed of anything, and he had lied and said no.

But he does dream, though, especially now, when Lip is too tired to drive and they have to pull over by the side of the road and lean their seats back because they don’t have enough money to rent a motel room until they make it to the next job, and it’s uncomfortable and cold and Lip will usually hum some stupid song to get Ian to fall asleep, but neither of them will be able to drift off for very long, and then Lip will be up and starting the car again and Ian won’t even be able to shut his eyes.

He does dream, though.

He dreams of fire.

***

They wind their way through Virginia and into Kentucky, and Ian makes a joke about trying to find a radio station that isn’t country music or fire and brimstone preaching, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, but Lip doesn’t laugh behind the shirt he has pressed tight to the right side of his face, the blood that has already soaked it through almost brown in the early morning light. Head wounds bleed the most, Lip had told Ian once, had told him again when Ian had peeled out of the driveway in Frank’s car and pointed it towards the nearest hospital, where they had sat arguing in the parking lot for ten minutes before Lip had told him to turn around because he wasn’t dying and nothing short of that would warrant a visit from the cops, and that Ian was stupid to bring him here, and that he better learn to goddamn think next time because Lip’s not gonna be around forever, you know.

They make it to one of the bars Frank had written down on a slip of paper not long after the fire, not long before he had left in the middle of the night without a forwarding address, and Ian knocks on the front door and isn’t surprised when no one answers. He sits in the car with Lip for another three hours, and Lip falls in and out of sleep, and Ian only knows he’s dreaming because he grabs Ian’s hand and won’t let go, his fingers flaking dried blood onto Ian’s palms, and Ian can’t make himself stop talking, whispering words against the cool glass of the window until his throat hurts from the strain.

And nothing about this is different from what they did last week, and maybe that’s why it aches so much.

It’s almost noon when he finally sees someone walking from their beat up Toyota to the door with keys in their hand, and he slowly extricates himself from Lip’s grip and makes it over to them, not bothering to hide the blood on his shirt, the blood on his hands. The man doesn’t even look at Ian, sliding the key into the lock and opening the door, and he says, “We’re not going to be open for another couple of hours,” and his body is blocking Ian from trying to get inside, and Ian says, “Please,” and it must have been the way he said it, because the man turns around and glances him over and then looks past him to Lip in the car, his face looking grim.

“Fuck,” he says, and exhales noisily, and Ian steps back a little bit, but the man just rolls his eyes and gestures inside.

“C’mon in, kid,” he says, and Ian does.

***

The man tells Ian that his name is Steve and to put Lip down on a cot in the back where he can get a good look at him, and Ian does what he says, pulling Lip out of the car and into the bar, his arm around Lip’s waist and Lip’s mouth wet on Ian’s neck. Steve peels off the bloody shirt from Lip’s face and winces, standing up to grab a bottle of whiskey from behind the bar.

“This will have to do for disinfectant,” he says, and upends the bottle into a rag. “Here,” he says, and offers the bottle to Ian, who swallows more than he should. Steve furrows his brow and looks as if he’s about to ask Ian if he’s old enough to even drink, but then thinks better of it and turns back to Lip.

“Will he be okay?” Ian asks, and his voice is calm and steady and not at all what it should sound like.

Steve ignores him and presses the rag to Lip’s face, wiping away the dried blood. “He’s gonna need stitches,” he says, and carefully wipes the rag around the edges of the claw marks, the jagged puzzle pieces of skin left on Lip’s face. He hunts around in the office for a while before he finds a needle, and Ian can feel something flutter in his stomach and die, and everything about this is just wrong.

“Hey,” Lip says, and Ian turns to him, and it’s only then that Ian realizes that Lip was awake, and it’s only then that Ian realizes that Ian had actually been crying, the tears that were welling hot and angry in his eyes, and Lip takes Ian’s hand in his own and tells him that he’s being stupid, and Steve leaves to get some thread, and Lip pushes up to kiss Ian on the mouth. “Stop,” Lip says, and Ian laughs, but it’s bitter, and nothing about this is right.

“I’ll be fine,” Lip says, and almost swallows half the bottle of whiskey before Steve comes back in.

“Ready?” Steve says, and Lip nods and lays back down.

***

Steve used to steal cars somewhere in the suburbs of Chicago, he tells Ian after Lip had passed out from the pain and liberal amount of whiskey in his stomach. They share cigarettes outside in the warm breeze, and Steve keeps letting his fingers touch Ian’s when they pass the pack around, and Ian doesn’t tell him to stop, and Steve says that he had a nice little business going, the driver for a chop shop where nobody asked too many questions and where he was paid tax free in stacks of cash that never seemed to end. Ian tells him that they were from Chicago, too, him and Lip and Frank and here he falters and Steve knows the look on his face like the back of his hand because it’s the look on every hunter’s face when they think about the first time they realized the monsters under their beds were actually real.

“I’m not going to ask what happened,” Steve says, and maybe it’s because he doesn’t care or maybe it’s because he saw the way Ian had tightened himself with regret or despair or something in between, but Steve doesn’t tell him what made him run away from his career criminal life in Chicago, either, what found him down in Kentucky in a shitty little bar that helped hunters get back on their feet again, so maybe it isn’t such a kindness after all.

“Thank you,” Ian says, and it’s for not asking and it’s for everything, and Steve shrugs and steals Ian’s cigarette and takes a drag from it, placing his lips on the filter in the exact same spot Ian had had his lips. Ian takes it back and presses his mouth to Steve’s, exhaling smoke when he pulls back.

“I mean it,” Ian says, and Steve raises his eyebrows.

And with Lip passed out on the cot in the bar, Steve pulls Ian behind the back and pushes him rough against the brick wall, and this, this is what Ian’s used to, so he presses himself flat and lets Steve pull down Ian’s jeans, and usually there’s this little half laugh against the back of Ian’s neck and a joke about how he can’t be much older than a younger brother or sister or first cousin that they haven’t seen in a while, before the life caught them with their hands on their dicks, before they became hunters, but Steve doesn’t make a sound, sliding smooth against Ian’s skin, sliding hard and fast.

Later, after Lip’s woken up and Ian’s gotten him to keep down a piece of toast and a glass of water, Lip kisses him and tells him that he’ll never leave him like Frank left, like Fiona and Carl and Debbie and Liam, and Ian turns into him and lets out a breath that he didn’t know he was holding and the tears come faster than they usually do, and he keeps breathing into the space between Lip’s shoulder and Lip’s neck, and he keeps thumbing the indents on his palms from where the brick bit his skin.

“I love you,” Lip says, and Ian forgets to say it back.

***

It starts after the fire.

It starts after their first hunt, where Lip shoots a poltergeist in Atlanta full of rock salt and Ian burns the bones of a little girl who was poisoned by her mother and the family who Lip had known in a previous life had given them a little bit of the money they had saved up before they had to move out of their house, and it had been Ian’s first motel room after Frank had fucked off to parts unknown, and they could only afford a double bed and Lip had promised Ian that this would be the first and last time, his fingers on Ian’s chest hot and palpable, and Ian’s wet mouth on the soft skin underneath Lip’s chin, and neither of them had lasted very long, but it was something that they both knew they could never stop. Not like Lip wanted them to, anyway, a clean break from something both of them needed more than anything else, something they could never forgive, something they could never forget.

It starts because Lip needs it more than Ian does, and because Ian can’t ever say no to him, and because Ian knows that one day he will meet a boy that he loves more than Lip and that Lip will have to let him go, and maybe it might be easier if they have this thing between them that’s nothing short of being wrong and beautiful, this thing between them that’s not supposed to happen, this thing between them that they can’t stop.

Maybe it might be easier if Lip’s hurting Ian more than he knows.

***

  
They round into Mississippi after Steve tells them that Lip’s about as good as he’ll ever get, a noticeable but kick ass scar starting at his hairline and running over the bridge of his nose and almost dissecting his eyebrow in two. It’s raw and red but most definitely healing, and after Steve had slipped Lip a few Vicodins for the ride home, after Lip had taken them and passed out in the backseat of the car and Steve had held Ian back with two fingers and a thumb on the pale inside of Ian’s wrist, after Steve had fucked him one more time in the space Lip had lain still and solid and drugged for three days, the cot still warm from his body heat, fucked him with a promise of something more than this, he had slipped Ian his phone number on the back of a torn receipt for two beers and told him that he should call him sometime if they ever passed state lines into Kentucky again, and it had felt like a lie or something close to it, so Ian had thrown the paper away at the next rest stop on the highway.

And then Lip had woken up somewhere past Memphis in the dark space of the car and told Ian in a sleepy, guttural tone that isn’t it funny that Steve had known Fiona once, about three lifetimes ago when they were still living in Chicago and she had just gotten out of a semi-serious relationship with Tony the cop and had rebound fucked Steve in the back bathroom of a club Veronica had dragged her to, drunk and a little high and soft and wet and vulnerable, and Steve had confessed his love for her and Fiona had laughed and told him to fuck off, but neither of them had been able to go any farther than that, because the day after they met, something had crawled into their house in the dead of the night and set Liam’s nursery on fire.

Ian hadn’t meant to, but he had slammed on the brakes so hard the car had swerved into the wrong lane. It took him three tries to open the door handle so he could lean out of the car to vomit.

***

They find a job in Jackson at a little house in the suburbs, where every once in a while the toys thrown haphazardly in a wooden chest of a little boy’s room come to life. The dad was a friend of a friend of Frank’s, who had called Lip when he was almost vivisected by a SpongeBob doll wielding a set of kitchen shears, seeming both desperate and shameless on the phone, pleading for his family’s lives into the receiver. Lip’s not a hundred percent, but he accepts it anyway, if only for a chance to stay in a real bed for once, sliding together in the guest bedroom with his hands on Ian’s hips and Ian’s pointed whispers that they have a job to do and that it’s not very professional if they were to be caught literally jerking each other off.

Through some kind of research magic, Lip finds an obscure website that only occasionally mentions the movie Child’s Play and is mostly a set of instructions on how to destroy a spirit who finds itself keen on possessing Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine, and they perform the exorcism quite cleanly, with minimal amount of bloodshed, leaving bags of sage and crosses in every corner of the house.

They’re paid in stacks of hundred dollar bills from the father who thanks them more times than they’ve ever been thanked on a job before, and Lip has a brief fantasy of taking the money to Vegas for a little road trip, but Ian rolls his eyes and tells him that they’re staying in a nice hotel this time, somewhere without the view of the neon lights of a strip club and the smell of cooking heroin next door, and Lip kisses him on the mouth in the car and reluctantly agrees, and both of them sleep well past sunrise the next day, and they take turns pushing each other out of bed for breakfast and lunch and dinner, which mostly consists of vending machine candy and room service French fries, and neither of them leave the hotel for anything until Lip realizes that he left his cell phone in the car and goes down in a t-shirt and jeans and bare feet to get it, his smile when he leaves the last thing Ian sees until he opens his eyes again a little while later and sees a boy with blonde hair standing by the little TV in the corner wearing a trench coat and eating a Snickers Lip had left on the untouched bed by the window.

Ian doesn’t say anything at first, and then opens his mouth to say everything at once, and then can’t speak, can’t breathe, can’t move, because there’s this feeling that comes over him like his ears and nose and eyes are all bleeding, like there’s something pushing hard against him that he can’t see and, worse, can’t stop, something that wants him to know it’s there. He presses his hand to his mouth and when he takes it back, there’s blood on his fingers, and the boy standing by the window tilts his head as if he doesn’t know why Ian’s in pain and then all of a sudden it stops.

“Oh,” Ian says, but it’s more of a sound that someone makes when they’ve just been hit by a freight train and the breath has completely left their lungs, and Ian places his bloody hand on his chest and watches as the boy comes closer, walking quietly over to the bed, and Ian wants to reach for the gun Lip keeps in his backpack, but it’s all the way by the door, and Ian is left naked in the bed except for his briefs, and his skin looks pale against the wild pattern of the hotel comforter, and he catches a glimpse of his hair in the mirror across the room and it looks like he’s on fire.

“Oh,” Ian says again, because the boy is moving closer and closer and he’s looking at Ian as if he wants to say something but can’t find the words, and Ian can’t move, can’t leave, because there’s something icy that’s gripping him around his throat, and he starts seeing black dots swimming around the room, and just before he feels himself slipping slowly out of consciousness, he remembers the night of the fire, when there was nothing but screams and heat and the thick black smoke that curled around his bed and Lip’s bed and around Fiona when she had grabbed Carl and Liam and tried to reach for Debbie, but ultimately failed because that was when the rafters holding onto the roof decided to start falling around them.

Ian never remembered much from that night, the pitch black crawl to the outside door on his broken hands and knees, the slip of Lip’s hands out of his when he had made a wrong turn somewhere near the bannister, and the heat, the rising heat that had rippled across his skin, blistering and burning everything in its path, and there had been a lapse of time between then and getting outside, when Ian had woken up on the cool grass of the manicured lawn, panting and swallowing and crying unshed tears, and maybe, in the first few moments of panic and abject terror and the choking feeling of the fire consuming him whole, maybe he had seen someone take his hand.

And maybe, in the gritty, tangible darkness, maybe it had been the boy who was standing in front of him now.

Just before Ian passes out, he reaches out for something, anything, and the boy in front of him slips his cool, dry hand into Ian’s palm and, suddenly, everything feels like it has a place, and Ian tries to smile but can’t because he can still feel the slick, wet taste of blood in his mouth and on his lips, so he doesn’t smile, but the boy pulls Ian close to him anyway, and neither of them make a sound.

***

When Ian wakes up, the boy is gone.

Lip comes back to the room with drive-thru cheeseburgers, but by then Ian has already taken an extremely cold and uncomfortable shower and cleaned the blood from his mouth and nose and ears and changed into something a little less revealing and waited by the door with Lip’s gun in his hand until he could hear the key card sliding into the slot on the handle. He doesn’t say anything to Lip, but it might not be because Lip wouldn’t believe him, and it might not be because Lip would believe him, and it might have everything to do with the fact that Ian wants to keep the boy all to himself.

***

It’s not until Mobile that he sees him again.

They find a job in a town made up of old, white plantation houses where the ailing seniors are all war veterans and the kids who play in the front yards in their Sunday church clothes look like they should be in ads for toothpaste or baking soda, and they somehow wind up getting placements in one of the local high schools where rumors of something that lives and breathes and sleeps in the boiler room downstairs likes to eat the little children and leave only pieces of skin behind. Ian and Lip spend more time interrogating the kids than listening in class, and their search finally pays off when they realize that one of the students is actually a shapeshifter, who’s been changing into popular boys and girls on the weekend just so he could go to parties and have sex and drink beer and smoke weed instead of staying home and studying.

Lip jokes and laughs, but at the end of the day, he plunges Frank’s old silver hunting blade right through the heart of the kid. Ian looks away as he does it, closing his eyes and breathing in and out and steadying himself before he turns back, and luckily Lip hasn’t seen it, because he’d just give Ian a lecture on how there will come a time when Ian’s going to have to learn how to do this himself, because Lip won’t always be around and everything supernatural won’t just stop cold the day that Phillip Gallagher dies, but unluckily Ian realizes that they’re not alone, and that the blonde boy from the hotel is standing right next to Lip.

Everything is still and silent, and Ian wants to say something, but he’s waiting for Lip to notice him, and nobody moves for two, three, four seconds, and then Ian realizes that Lip is frozen and can’t move at all. “Lip,” he says, and makes an abortive gesture towards him, but the boy speaks before he even steps forward.

“There is nothing wrong with him,” the boy says, and Ian feels suddenly angry, like he’s not sure why this is happening, and he’s definitely not sure why this is happening to him.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asks, and the boy tilts his head like he did in the hotel, and he smiles like he’s not sure why Ian would be upset.

“You would not be able to pronounce my real name, Ian Gallagher,” the boy says, and Ian starts at the sound of his name rolling off of the boy’s tongue, smooth and familiar, and something warm in his belly jumps and dances around. “The vessel’s name is Mickey, though.”

“Vessel?” Ian says, and it sounds stupid even coming out of his mouth. “Look,” he says, “I don’t know who you are, but we’re hunters and we kill people like you all the time, and I have a gun in my bag and I know how to use it.” He slings the messenger bag he has hanging over his shoulder from his hip to in front of him, reaching in for the butt of the Lip’s gun. “I don’t think you really want to mess with us, dude.”

The boy frowns, and Ian thinks that maybe they got a retarded ghost following them around or something, but then he laughs, and it sounds gentle and nice coming from his soft, clean mouth. “This vessel is a servant of God,” Mickey says, gesturing to his body, the trench coat and the dirty, rumpled clothes underneath. “And I am an angel of the Lord.”

“I don’t believe in angels,” Ian says, and it’s bitter and cruel and the way that Mickey looks at him makes him want to take it back, but the fire had not only burned his house and his family inside, but it had also burned something that used to be a part of him, too, and whatever that was is now gone and nothing could bring it back.

“Well, believe in me,” Mickey says, and closes the five steps between them, placing his two front fingers on the place between Ian’s eyebrows.

***

When Ian wakes up again, he brings his hand to his head before he even opens his eyes, groaning, and says, “Last fucking time.”

Mickey is standing over him from where he is lying on the motel bed, and his hair is blinding in the poor, recessed lighting, and Ian turns away, but Mickey holds out a hand and brushes red strands out of Ian’s face. Ian tries not to flinch, but doesn’t succeed, and Mickey pulls his hand away like he’s been burnt.

“Where’s Lip?” Ian croaks.

“Safe,” Mickey replies, and whether that’s true or not, Ian doesn’t know, but there’s nothing he can do about it here, lying on the bed in his terrible, tacky motel room with a boy who claims to be an angel with a horrible penchant for forcing people into unconsciousness. “I needed to talk to you alone without your brother.” Mickey has the gall to look sheepish above him, rubbing his hand along the back of his neck. “I tried last time, but I did not realize that you could not understand my voice.”

“The bleeding,” Ian guesses, and Mickey nods. “Yeah, well, what do you want, then?”

“You,” Mickey says, and Ian almost chokes.

“What?”

“You, Ian Gallagher,” and Mickey sits down on the bed and his thigh is touching Ian’s arm, but neither of them move, and Ian looks up at him and can’t remember anything else, because there’s something here that’s been with him for a very long time, something here that’s bigger than what Ian could see. “I have been watching you for a very long time,” Mickey says, and Ian swallows painfully.

“What do you mean?” Ian looks at Mickey and Mickey looks at him and Ian says, “Do you mean the fire?”

Mickey nods. “I pulled you out because it was not your time to die.”

Ian swallows back the wave of nausea that threatens to climb up his throat. “What about Fiona?” he says, subdued, and Mickey tilts his head again, confused. “What about Carl and Debbie and Liam? Was it their fucking time to die?”

Ian gets off the bed and crosses to the other side of the room, his arms on his chest a shield between them. “Who got to choose?” he asks, and his voice is tight and loud in the small room. “Was it you? You got to choose to save me, for what? Your own personal play thing?”

“No,” Mickey says, and here he sounds almost angry. “No.”

“Then why? Why choose me?”

Mickey lifts himself off the bed and walks toward Ian and, for a moment, everything in the room is hard and tense and palpable, and Ian wants so badly to have Lip here, ready by his side with a gun or a knife or whatever, whatever will kill a motherfucking angel, but it’s only him and it’s only Mickey, and there’s this thing between them that pushes and pulls at the same time, this thing between them that ignites, this thing between them that wants. Ian doesn’t move, and Mickey is right there, right in front of him, and it would be nothing just to lift up and press his mouth to Mickey’s mouth, his lips swollen and red and almost aching to be touched.

“Why me?” Ian whispers, and Mickey is right there, and Ian can feel his breath tickle the side of his face, and it’s everything and it’s nothing and this is what Lip has always been afraid of, this moment here where maybe Ian will find somebody who makes him feel like this, like there’s this thing inside of him that’s fragile enough to break, this thing that skips and dances and jumps around in the pit of his stomach, this thing that begs to be let out.

Mickey closes the gap between them, and his lips are soft at first, soft and warm, but Ian presses hungrily into his mouth and then they’re biting and licking and Ian feels the swell of his tongue against Mickey’s tongue, and this is fucking insane, because Ian doesn’t even know why he’s doing this, doesn’t even know what’s going on, kissing an angel in the middle of his hotel room in Mobile, Alabama with Lip still frozen on the other side of town in the boiler room of a high school, hovering over the dead body of a sixteen year old shapeshifter. Nothing about this is even remotely sane, but everything about this feels right, and Ian presses harder, and Mickey leans down to adjust, and he slips his hand to the back of Ian’s neck and Ian grips the lapels of Mickey’s trench coat in order to pull him closer, and there’s not even air between them anymore, and Ian moans out in a voice he’s never used before, and Mickey looks almost startled for a second before he pulls back, his lips wet and shiny with Ian’s saliva.

They stay there, panting, for a moment, until Mickey really does pull back, stepping away from Ian, turning slightly towards the cold, open space of the room. Ian lifts his hand to his mouth and can’t think for two, three, four seconds, can’t even begin to comprehend what that was.

“Because,” Mickey says, finally, in the silence of the room where it’s nothing but the cyclical hum of the air conditioning unit and Ian’s heavy breathing and the dark, hoarse tone of Mickey’s voice that’s not even his real voice, not even his angel voice, but dry and used nonetheless, and Ian turns to him and wants to kiss him all over again.

This might be a problem, Ian realizes, watching Mickey compose himself with the angel strength he must carry around inside of him, watching him stop and falter and start back up again, breathing steady at last.

“Because,” Mickey says again. “We have work for you.”


End file.
